Dragon’s Roost — Sketches

Brandon — Sun, 06 May 2012 22:34:42 +0000

When I first started thinking through ideas for the Seven Deadly Sins art show I felt like I either had to represent all of the sins (Pride, Envy, Lust, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Wrath) or just focus on one. Lust seemed to be too easy, so I played around with some sketches for each of the sins and came up with the concept of Sloth as a fat dragon. And what makes Sloth a sin? Why it’s crushing undeserving spawnlings under the weight of your laziness.

After trying out some different ideas with the fat dragon, I sketched out another dragon laying on the fat dragon. It made me start thinking about how I could incorporate a representation of all the dragons in the same illustration.

The scribble on the right was my first concept for the final composition. I started working out details of the piece and thinking about ideas for each dragon.

Playing around with lots of ideas. Part of designing characters is working through the cliches first. Eventually you have nothing left to do but come up with some new ideas. Fortunately I liked enough of my ideas that I actually didn’t have a place for all of the ones I liked. A documentary on lizards on the galapagos island helped with inspiration.

The “final” thumbnail. I blew up this sketch and refined it with marker paper.

To get this:

From there I took it into Photoshop and refined it to the sketch in this post. One thing you’ll notice as the sketch is refined is the changes in relative scale. One of the things that was important to sell the concept was having interesting contrasts in scale. In the initial sketch the dragon queen was too large compared to the other dragons. I scaled here down, and cropped in on the bottom dragon to make him seem more massive; as if he is emerging from below. I think I could have pushed his size even more.

From there it was ink, ink, ink, color, color.

Dragon’s Roost — Part 3

Brandon — Wed, 02 May 2012 19:38:44 +0000

Still some work to do on the Background, but it’s basically there.

Dragon’s Roost — Part 2

Brandon — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:05:09 +0000

Next Stop, color.

Dragon’s Roost

Brandon — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:12:15 +0000

Something I’m working on for the upcoming Seven Deadly Sins art show.

Happy Holidays

Brandon — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:00:41 +0000

A little Christmas treat. More coming in 2012.

That’s All…For Now

Brandon — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:00:55 +0000

Still no news on when or how the next Green Monk will be published. This will probably be the last pages I’ll post until something is figured out. You should be able to get a good idea from the story, if you’ve been following along. By this time I’ve started to work with a combination of brush and micron. I still love brush for larger shapes, but microns really come in handy when I want to fly on drawing smaller objects.

Nose Punch!

Brandon — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:00:38 +0000

I’ve been meaning to post these for quite awhile. It’s been over a year since Monopoly Streets has been released, but there’s still a bit of stuff I wanted to show. I just wasn’t sure how best to post this, and I hope this work okay.

One of the assignments I got was to take the first pass on storyboarding a promo piece of Mr. Monopoly “planting” a city. I love it when I get a chance to storyboard, and I try to find the right balance of communicating as clearly as possible without taking too much time to make things look nice.

I try to really push the boundaries when I’m doing this stuff. You can always pull something back if it’s too far out there, but playing it safe is just playing it safe. I got a particular hard time from my art director on this project about a shot he likes to call the “Nose Punch”. See if you can find it.

I recommend clicking on the link that says “View with PicLens”.

[View with PicLens]

Still Going

Brandon — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:29:43 +0000

Some more pages for Green Monk Volume 1. I’m starting to get more comfortable with using blacks. Still some things to figure out, but I’m certainly learning a lot about full-page layout in the process. I need to start being much more disciplined about paneling as I’m inking. I spent too much time cleaning this up in post to make them fit in the panels.

The Saga Continues

Brandon — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:31:12 +0000

So, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about when the next Green Monk will be coming out. The best answer I can give right now, is that I’m working on it, but I haven’t yet nailed down how I will be publishing the next book, so I can’t really say yet when it will be released.

That being said, I have been working on the next book. As proof, here are the next couple of pages.

Enjoy, and I hope to be figuring out the next step soon.

Page One

Brandon — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:32:44 +0000

Thought I’d take a break from the Monopoly art to show the start of Green Monk Book 1. I’m making a big departure from the mini comic in a couple of ways. First of all, I’m relying much more on brush, and only using microns for detail work. Second, I’m trying to use a lot more blacks. It’s been fun. Hopefully, I’ll figure out what I’m doing as I go along.

You can see the rough pencils here.